I am Roy Christopher. I be thinking about stuff.
Sometimes I write about it.

My Books

I contributed several entries to the St. James Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Culture (St. James, Press, 2018), including ones on Gangsta Rap, Horrorcore, Rap Metal, and the hip-hop scene in my beloved Pacific Northwest. This massive, 500-page encyclopedia covers all aspects of hip-hop culture and is essential for libraries, institutions, and researchers alike.

The editors of The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies describe my chapter ("The End of an Aura: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Haunting of Hip-hop") like this: "Christopher’s text by and large comprises a series of quotes by divergent authors, ranging from cyberpunk to hip-hop, which take the shape of an intertextual collage that turns into a case study of authenticity in the time of constant digital reproduction."

My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is an anthology of interviews with all kinds of minds. Disinformation named it "among the most important books published in 2007," and Erik Davis called it "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so."

Even with a space seemingly cut out for them by a family of description-defying groups, ready-made genres, and audiences lying in wait, some sounds still just seem to don’t fit anywhere. As I wrote previously about another post-something band, when genre-specific adjectives fail, we grasp at significant exemplars from the past to describe new sounds. Following Straw (1991), Josh Gunn (1999) calls this “canonization” (p. 42): The synecdochical use of a band’s name for a genre is analogous to our using metaphors, similes, and other figurative language when literal terms fall short. Where bands sometimes emerge that do not immediately fit into a genre (e.g., Godflesh, Radiohead, dälek, et al.) or adhere too specifically to the sound of one band (e.g., the early 21st-century spate of bands that sound like Joy Division), we run into this brand of genre trouble.

Post-Rock would seem to be just such a genre. Ever since Simon Reynolds etched the term into the annals of music journalism, there has been a post-everything-else. Sometimes it’s just lazy writing, sometimes it’s for marketing purposes, and sometimes a genre has truly emerged alongside its parent designation. Regardless, in Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post-Rock (Function Books, 2015), Jack Chuter tries to get to the bottom of all things post-rock, even devoting an entire chapter to Reynolds himself. There seems to be very little consensus on exactly where Rock crossed the line and became something else. The roots of the genre run deep and in many directions (e.g., Prog, Brian Eno, Jazz, CAN, PiL, Industrial, Jim O’Rourke, et al.), and Chuter goes as far back as the New Romanticism of Talk Talk and its separate ways before moving on to Slint and Slint-inspired rock.

If any band is worthy of its own genre, it is Slint: a band certainly more talked-about than listened-to. About such talking-about and genres as they emerge in writing, Lisa Gitelman (2014) writes,

As I understand it, genre is a mode of recognition instantiated in discourse. Written genres, for instance, depend on a possibly infinite number of things that large groups of people recognize, will recognize, or have recognized that writings can be for (p. 2).

As Star (1991) and Gunn (1999) describe canonization above, Gitelman contends that genres emerge from discourse. Subsequently, we internalize them. They are inside us. She continues,

Likewise genres—such as the joke, the novel, the document, and the sitcom—get picked out contrastively amid a jumble of discourse and often across multiple media because of the ways they have been internalized by constituents of a shared culture. Individual genres aren’t artifacts, then; they are ongoing and changeable practices of expression and reception that are recognizable in myriad and variable constituent instances at once and also across time. They are specific and dynamic, socially realized sites and segments of coherence within the discursive field (p. 2).

Chuter’s pathway through Post-Rock also goes as far out as the Post-Metal of Neurosis and Isis, and as current as 65daysofstatic, God is an Astronaut, and This Will Destroy You. Just when you think Post-Rock is too narrow a designation for a book-length exploration, with a quick list one sees how wide its waves crash.

Further mapping the fringes, Sounds of the Underground (University of Michigan Press, 2016) by Stephen Graham covers everything from extreme noise to black metal, and from hardcore improvisation to the festivals and venues that host them. Graham distills a massive amount of cultural, political, and aesthetic history into his investigation, and his attention to the means of production, the shifting control thereof, changes in consumption, and the lack of change in content are all paramount to the story.

Graham concludes by writing, “whatever boundaries I’ve laid down should be understood as liquid and tentative” (p. 243). Noting the gauziness of genre doesn’t necessarily negate the pursuit of classification. As radically subjective as music fandom can be, it’s nice to have some signposts. These two books are maps made of many.

Further Posting:

My main interests are figurative language use and the social impacts of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I’m more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic.

I'm currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at The University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the Adjunct Faculty at Loyola University Chicago. I hold a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in Communication from San Diego State University. I'm also working on several books. This site is where I think aloud about all of the above. Read on »